Julie Mehretu: "Mural" | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #106: Julie Mehretu puts the finishing touches on her large-scale painting "Mural" at Goldman Sachs, adjusting shapes and colors in dialogue with the architecture and views from the street.

Julie Mehretu's paintings and drawings refer to elements of mapping and architecture, achieving a calligraphic complexity that resembles turbulent atmospheres and dense social networks. Architectural renderings and aerial views of urban grids enter the work as fragments, losing their real-world specificity and challenging narrow geographic and cultural readings. The paintings' wax-like surfaces—built up over weeks and months in thin translucent layers—have a luminous warmth and spatial depth, with formal qualities of light and space made all the more complex by Mehretu's delicate depictions of fire, explosions, and perspectives in both two and three dimensions. Her works engage the history of nonobjective art—from Constructivism to Futurism—posing contemporary questions about the relationship between utopian impulses and abstraction.

Learn more about Julie Mehretu at: http://www.art21.org/artists/julie-mehretu

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Wesley Miller. Camera & Sound: Nick Ravich. Editor: Mary Ann Toman. Thanks: Erika Fortner; Jessica Kingdon; Goldman, Sachs, & Co.; Harmony Murphy; and Damien Young.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• art
• artist
• contemporary
• visual
• julie mehretu
• painting
• mural
• goldman sachs
• installation

[afaf233]

@larssvanholm total fraud

[larssvanholm]

just brilliant!



[eotto2001]

@elasutbe what a great post... ;-)

[neonaction]

that's just stupid

[elasutbe]

Stuart Davis has a posse

[eddiemambo]

Beautiful Piece Of Art !

Congrats  Julie Mehretu -- NYC forEver

[notecopies]

great modus operandi

[artbystevejohnson]

I used to think that a 6' x 5' canvas was a large work!